the right to self-determination for all nations that were oppressed 
by tsarism and Great Russian bourgeoisie, including the right of these na­
tions to separate from Russia.
Therefore, we, the Council of People's Commissars, recognize the 
Ukrainian People's Republic, its right to completely separate 
from Russia or to enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic on 
federative and all other mutual relations between them.
Everything that concerns the national rights and national indepen­
dence of the Ukrainian people is recognized by us, the Council of People's 
Commissars, immediately, without limitations and unconditionally.
Against the Finnish bourgeois republic, which for now remains 
bourgeois, we have not taken a single step in the sense of limiting the 
national rights and national independence of the Finnish people, and we 
shall not take any steps limiting the national independence of any nation 
among those that were and wish to be part of the Russian Republic.*
We accuse the Rada of the fact that, concealing itself behind national 
phrases, it conducts an ambiguous bourgeois policy, which long has 
already been expressed in the Rada's non-recognition of Soviets and 
Soviet power in Ukraine (among other things, the Rada refused to convene, 
at the demand of the Ukrainian Soviets, a regional congress of Ukrainian 
Soviets immediately). This ambiguous policy, depriving us of the possi­
bility of recognizing the Rada as a plenipotentiary representative of the 
laboring and exploited masses of the Ukrainian Republic, has driven the 
Rada in the most recent time to actions meaning a break with any possi­
bility of agreement.
Such actions have been, first, the disorganization of the Front.
The Rada relocates and recalls Ukrainian units from the Front by unilateral 
orders, thereby destroying the unified common Front prior to a demarcation 
achievable only through organized agreement between the governments of 
both republics.
Second, the Rada has begun to disarm the Russian Soviet troops 
stationed in Ukraine.
Third, the Rada is rendering support to the Cadet-Kaledinite conspiracy 
and uprising against Soviet power. Falsely alleging so-called autonomous 
rights of the "Don and Kuban," covering with this the Kaledinite counter­
revolutionary activities, which run counter to the interests and demands of 
the vast majority of the laboring Cossackry, the Rada allows troops to pass 
through its territory to Kaledin,* refusing to allow troops to pass 
against Kaledin.
Taking this path of unprecedented betrayal of the revolution, the path of 
support for the most bitter enemies of both the national independence of the 
nations of Russia and of Soviet power, enemies of the laboring and exploited 
masses, the Cadets and Kaledinites, the Rada would compel us to declare, 
without any hesitation, war upon it, even if it were already entirely formally 
recognized and indisputable organ of supreme state power, an independent 
bourgeois Ukrainian republic.
At the present time, in view of all the above-stated circumstances, the 
Council of People's Commissars [is compelled to] sets:

* A. M. Kaledin — general, who at the end of November 1917 with the aid of General 
Alexeyev's "volunteers" began the struggle against the Soviets.

See "Fundamental Provisions of the Manifesto," section 4, p. 60. — Ed.

LENIN COLLECTION